| YOU ARE HERE:Finding the Life You Want In The City You Live |
[Nov. 5th, 2009|02:29 pm] |
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<a target="_blank" href=""><img title="" style="border-style: none; border-width: 0px;" src="http://www.lifeepicurean.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/youarehereheader.jpg"></a> <br> <p>Over the next few weeks, <em>You Are Here</em> will explore the proto-typical urban center of the US. These articles will relate strategies and constants that are discovered and developed through surveys, interviews and experiments in the Columbus area, a noted test market. Topics will range from how to become a coffee shop regular in 2 weeks, to karaoke-ing with gusto, and plenty in between. Drawing on expertise and opinions from professionals and layman alike, <em>You Are Here</em> will give So and So a better understanding of how to find a better understanding of his city. <a target="_new" href="http://www.lifeepicurean.com/?p=2924">READ MORE HERE.</a><br></p><br><br> |
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| Crawling Toward Chaos; Inverting Lovecraft |
[Nov. 5th, 2009|01:33 am] |
* Surely, you've all been listening to the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast, right? Two Santa Monica film guys bust each other up and talk Lovecraft, story by story, in an engaging and often illuminating fashion. Plus, their narrative and incidental instincts are knife-keen, as befits film guys. If you haven't made a habit of listening, may I recommend the perfect jumping-on place? As those who know me may have suspected by now, it's the one featuring me as a guest: Episode 18, on the prose poems "Nyarlathotep" and "The Crawling Chaos." They've promised to have me back on, and I am eager to return. Plus, they regularly cite Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales during their show (though not during this episode), and they gave me a very nice plug for Cthulhu 101. So listen up!
* In other, non-meta-plug news, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mollpeartree and I watched The Ruins tonight, part of my "flood the Netflix zone" plan to make sure there were plenty of horror movie options for Halloween. It's a pretty terrific horror movie, which (like many great horror movies) makes the characters wreak at least as much horror on themselves as the horrors do. Like Lovecraft, it values verisimilitude (even moreso, given the aforementioned character-driven realism), and presents a horror of the Outside come up from Below. But interestingly, the swarthy natives who live Where Horror Dwells are the ones staunchly committed to fighting it; it's the white Americans (and German) who are decadent enough to let the Outside come In.1 Add a nice eco-noia monster-thing and some excellent sound design and atmospherics (I'd like to see the same production team try and tackle "The Willows," come to think of it) and you got yourself a fine 21st-century weird tale.
1] There's elements of that formula in "Shadow Over Innsmouth," of course -- the Pacific Islanders slaughtered the Deep Ones, while white Obed Marsh married them -- and in "Haunter of the Dark," in which the non-WASP Italians and Poles keep the Haunter at bay while white-bread Robert Blake communes with it. But these stand out as exceptions, and "Shadow" is plenty racially fraught, for all that. |
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| No Signing Wednesday |
[Nov. 3rd, 2009|10:07 pm] |
Just an update for people expecting to see me at Third Coast on Wednesday, Nov. 4 -- once more, Diamond made a hash of the shipment, so there's no copies of Cthulhu 101 for people to buy. I'll announce the re-re-scheduled signing in this space once Third Coast has some books in hand.
Ho, for the glamorous life of a writer! |
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| Take that Randroids |
[Nov. 2nd, 2009|07:23 pm] |
Hat tip to prock from over in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) talk_politics:
Instead of using "opinion" to ferret (rat?) out the truth, actual data is sometimes more useful. This is especially true when the "opinions" being offered sound as if they are coming from albino rats undergoing strange psychological experiments in a controlled environment.
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/products/socind/inc-eco.htm
country per capita GDP
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Liechtenstein $118,040
Luxembourg $108,217
Bermuda $86,450
Norway $82,465
Qatar $75,978
Iceland $62,033
Ireland $59,540
Denmark $57,257
Cayman Islands $57,222
Switzerland $56,579
San Marino $55,055
British Virgin Islands $51,273
Sweden $49,873
Netherlands $46,669
Finland $46,371
Australia $45,590
United Kingdom $45,549
United States $45,047
In the contest of efficient governments, social democracies (aka zOMG SOCIALISM!!!) do quite well. Of course, there are a lot of factors that come into play including immigration, fat tail distributions, climate, geopolitical and trade relations. But even with all that, it does look like "socialism" does just fine when it comes to economic efficiency.
Who'd a thunk it? |
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| This article brings up something that has been rolling around in my mind. |
[Nov. 1st, 2009|01:56 pm] |
If unemployment is above 10% by the end of next summer, any arguments that the democrats averted a Great Depression 2 will largely be ignored. I think that the unemployment rate will peak at just over 10% in spring, but how far down will it get by around August and September when people are thinking about who they are going to vote for? That unemployment rate needs to get below 9% for the general public to feel like there has been any progress on the economy no matter what the stock market or GDP are. To me, that is the dividing line. If we have 8.9% the democrats may keep control of the house and senate, but if it is 9.1 they will lose. I know that those numbers are extremely close to one another to seem silly to make that much of a difference, yet numbers do have that power in peoples minds. What is your two cents?
A key figure in 2010 election: U.S. jobless rate |
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| Brief summary of the House health bill |
[Nov. 1st, 2009|04:45 am] |
The horrible socialism:
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2009/Senate/Maps/Oct30-s.html#1
Coverage
* People who like their current plan may keep it.
* Individuals not covered and some small business may buy insurance at new exchanges.
* One of the offerings at these exchanges will be a nonprofit public plan.
* A committee chaired by the Surgeon General will draw up a list of benefits all plans must include.
* Insurance companies will no longer be allowed to discriminate against sick people.
* Annual and lifetime limits on payments will be forbidden.
* Children may be covered by their parents' plans until age 27.
* All plans will have to offer preventative medicine for free.
* About 96% of the population will be covered; most of the rest are illegal aliens (not covered)
Affordability
* Families making up to 4x the poverty level ($88,000) will get federal subsidies.
* The Medicaid income limit will be raised 50%, making more people eligible.
* Patient out-of-pocket expenditures for health care will be capped at $10,000 per family.
* Part of the Medicare "donut hole" will be plugged.
* Medicare will be allowed to negotiate prices with drug companies.
* Insurance companies will have to spend 85% of their premium income on medical care.
Shared Responsibility
* Anyone who does not have insurance must pay a fine of 2.5% of their income.
* Any large company not offering a health plan will be taxed at 8% of its payroll.
* Insurance companies will no longer be exempt from the nation's antitrust laws.
He notes that by rejecting Medicare + 5% and accepting "HHS can negotiate with providers", the conservative Democrats are opting for the more expensive option. Business interests and "no socialism!" trumps fiscal conservatism (i.e. less government spending) |
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| Obama was Right about Fox News |
[Oct. 29th, 2009|12:46 pm] |
Interesting read from the Wall Street Journal opinion page:
The network's moaners swung instantly into self-pitying action likening the administration's combative attitude to Richard Nixon's famous "enemies list."
They should remember that it wasn't just the keeping of a list that made Nixon's hostility to the media remarkable. Nearly every president—and probably just about every politician—has criticized the press at some point or other. What made the Nixon administration stand out is that it also sued the New York Times to keep that paper from publishing the Pentagon Papers. It schemed to ruin the Washington Post financially by challenging the broadcast licenses for the TV stations it owned. It bugged the office of Joseph Kraft, a prominent newspaper columnist. One of its most notorious henchmen was G. Gordon Liddy, who tells us in his autobiography that under certain conditions he was "willing to obey an order to kill [columnist] Jack Anderson."
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To point out that this network is different, that it is intensely politicized, that it inhabits an alternate reality defined by an imaginary conflict between noble heartland patriots and devious liberals—to be aware of these things is not the act of a scheming dictatorial personality. It is the obvious conclusion drawn by anybody with eyes and ears. |
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| Coal industry hires consultant that forges letters from minorty groups |
[Oct. 29th, 2009|03:56 pm] |
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Two weeks before the House voted on the historic Waxman-Markey climate bill, a number of key Democrats received letters purportedly from minority groups, urging them to oppose the legislation. The now-infamous letters turned out to be forgeries generated by Bonner and Associates, a political consulting firm working on behalf of the coal industry. The story of exactly how the letters found their way to Congress has remained murky, and Bonner has repeatedly blamed the incident on a renegade temp. But documents released today by a congressional investigation and viewed by Mother Jones lift the lid on Bonner’s inner workings—offering fresh evidence that deceptive tactics weren't an anomaly for the firm, but were built into its standard operating procedure.
link
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Remember, it's always the government's fault. Lobbyists never do bad things -- industry is literally forced to have a lobbying presence. If Congress would just stop writing bills, all negative externalities would be erased by the Disney magic of pure competition and ugly things like this wouldn't have to happen. |
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| Crime, politics, and the law |
[Oct. 26th, 2009|10:55 pm] |
The Economist unintentionally had three interconnected articles on the law in the US section this week. I found each one interesting for various reasons.
The Velvet Glove
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14699623
Until 2004 the West End neighbourhood in High Point, North Carolina, was an open-air drug market. Gun shots punctuated the night. Honest folk were scared to walk to the shops. Jim Summey, a local preacher, recalls a Sunday when his flock could not park because the street was jammed with johns seeking sex and drugs. When he remonstrated with the dealers, they smashed up his car and shot out 58 windows in his church.
Yet West End is now as peaceful as evensong...But then they tried something different. On the advice of David Kennedy, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, they started talking to community leaders in West End. They found out who the street drug-dealers were. There were fewer than they had expected: only 16, of whom three were habitually violent. Patiently, they compiled dossiers on each of them. Then they arrested and prosecuted the violent ones, and invited the rest in for a chat.
Would a policy similar to this work in places within the firm grip of gangs? Is punishment the goal of law, or is it safety/security? If it is the latter, maybe towns should look into this method, which seems to encourage peace, but allows the law to still be flaunted. Contrast this to NY's experience in the 90's.
The next entry was on capital punishment...
Capital Punishment
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14699746
In this, it looks like Rick Perry may have accidentally allowed the execution of an innocent man, based on shoddy evidence. Capital punishment should be allowed, but it should be carefully implemented. Cases like this greatly weaken the usefulness of capital punishment. If we are not certain in the law, we should not punish. I'd rather see a man behind bars unjustly than dead without recourse. If anyone seriously does not care, then that is beyond troubling.
The last article is about a Sheriff in Arizona, famous for humiliating people.
Still Going After Them
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14700628
JOE ARPAIO, the elected sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona, revels in controversy. “I use my inmates as Hollywood,” he practically shouts, as he explains why he makes prisoners wear pink underwear, parades them through downtown Phoenix in chain gangs and houses them in army tents left over from the Korean war. “I want everybody to know it’s 130 degrees in those tents,” he booms. He thinks people ought to be ready for “America’s toughest sheriff” before even thinking about coming to Maricopa without papers.
This guy reminds me of a carnival act/stage show. His usage of the law for untoward reasons, including investigations of opponents, is troubling, and yet he is popular. Again, is the law used for punishment, or for maintenance of order?
Does anyone here support this Sheriff?
Crossposted to places you are reading this... |
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| Health insurer profits not as fat as Dems claim |
[Oct. 27th, 2009|10:28 am] |
Profit margins are anemic compared with a variety of industries - Quick quiz: What do these enterprises have in common? Farm and construction machinery, Tupperware, the railroads, Hershey sweets, Yum food brands and Yahoo? Answer: They're all more profitable than the health insurance industry. - In the health care debate, Democrats and their allies have gone after insurance companies as rapacious profiteers making "immoral" and "obscene" returns while "the bodies pile up." - Ledgers tell a different reality. Health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent, give or take a point or two. That's anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries, even some beleaguered ones.
- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33470129/ns/politics-health_care_reform/
[ 6%. that's obscene all right! but, then, the [wo]man on the street characteristically overestimates the profits corporations earn. i read somewhere that a lot of people think they make 30-40% profits. how politically expeeedient! ] |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 28th, 2009|11:03 am] |
Public option fiber optic lines lead to brand-new private fiber optic lines.
There are three things to be taken from this story. First, even the threat of a "public option" can lead to the private sector adding or upgrading services. Second, private companies are crap at maintaining and investing in infrastructure unless forced to. Third, and this is a big one, there might have been better service via competition if the city government hadn't signed a franchise agreement in the first place.
Of course, the city might not have had internet service at all without said franchise agreement, but the fact remains that it might have contributed to the problem.
A fourth thing to add may be that private companies play dirty whenever possible. Whether this is a good or bad thing is up for debate. |
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| Hachintosk Mini9 |
[Oct. 27th, 2009|04:12 pm] |
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Got the Mac Netbook up and running. Protip: don't buy the box set, you can install the whole thing with the $30 upgrade DVD. |
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